Dima swept his calloused palm across the workbench for the fourth time in twenty minutes, brushing away invisible dust. The single-bay garage sat frigid despite the military surplus heater grumbling in the corner. November in Moscow mocked its feeble output.

  “Flux there, copper strippers here,” he muttered, aligning tools with millimetric precision along the grid etched in permanent marker years ago.

  The oscilloscope caught his eye, cold metal beneath his fingertips. Though functioning perfectly since its salvage, something nagged at him. A slight adjustment, an exhale. Unsatisfied. No time for this.

  The wall clock ticked past seven. Twenty-three minutes until they arrived.

  Labels on the shelves guided his fingers across their familiar terrain. Glass jars of capacitors sorted by microfarad, resistors by colour bands, connectors by pin count. Inventory gaps jumped out at a glance.

  “Too many 330s, not enough 470s.” The assembly line beckoned again.

  Circuit boards pinned down the corners of an acetate sheet “borrowed” from the television factory. Irina's “Babushka Bridge” controller design sprawled across it—a bridge between technological eras. Three revisions marked in pencil, each streamlined beyond the last.

  His Nokia 3210 vibrated against the workbench. Dima snatched it up, peering at the dim screen. Azamat's message blazed: Found Hitachi supplier. 3 units possible. 2800? each. Firm price.

  Blood surged through his veins. The HD64180 CPU, with its integrated memory management unit, promised to transform their fantasy into reality—if Azamat delivered.

  Moscow wind rattled the doorframe. Doubts crept in. The design. The current capacity. The traces—

  A sharp shake of his head. Dima grabbed the Zenith Moscow scarf from its nail by the door, wrapping it around his neck against the garage's chill. The embroidered crest beneath his thumb evoked packed stands of working men, united beyond their daily struggles.

  The Pentagon motherboard sprawled on its testing platform, bristling with additional RAM chips and timing crystals. Five chairs scrounged from office skips encircled the workbench.

  The phone buzzed. Irina's message flashed: Incoming. Bringing the prototype.

  Frost crystallized his exhaled breath as Dima tweaked the useless heater. The empty motherboard socket drew his gaze—a void awaiting the processor to bridge past and future, pending Azamat's reliability.

  A final inspection. Components under scrutiny. Assembly line habits persisted, where mistakes meant scrap metal and lighter wages.

  Knuckles rapped against metal twelve minutes ahead of schedule.

  Metal clanged across the garage complex as Irina weaved between rows of identical brick structures. Sodium lamps painted orange streaks over the Soviet-era buildings, reflecting off oily puddles left by yesterday's sleet.

  The weight of her satchel dragged at her cyberpunk-patched jacket. A bottle of Stolichnaya clinked against her thigh, its logo peering through technical diagrams wrapped around the glass—a neat cutout framing the label.

  “Ceremonial offering,” she muttered, skirting a deep puddle. Her boots squelched through wet concrete while she tracked the garage numbers.

  The metro line rumbled beneath her feet. A glance at her watch confirmed seven minutes early—time enough to prepare her demonstration before the others arrived.

  Blue light seeped around the edges of Dima's steel door. She rapped her knuckles in the agreed pattern: three quick, two slow.

  Metal scraped as Dima worked each lock. The door ground open, and he stepped back with a subtle nod.

  “Early,” he noted, securing the locks behind her.

  “So are you,” Irina replied, Dublin vowels colouring her words.

  They positioned themselves across the workbench. Dima thumbed the worn edge of his Zenith scarf before tucking it safely away from the soldering station while Irina slid the vodka bottle toward him.

  “For later,” she explained.

  Dima gripped the acetate sheet, thumbnail flicking its edge as he studied the layout. His finger jabbed a section near the power traces.

  “You kept the width at sixteen mil here?” More curiosity than challenge.

  Irina crossed her arms, redistributing her weight. “Fourteen should hold with two-ounce copper. MMU needs stable voltage, not overkill.”

  “Factory standard says sixteen.”

  “Factory standard assumes one-ounce copper,” she countered, shoving a solder spool aside to clear workspace.

  Dima's fingers traced the diagram's pathway. “You swept the corners to forty-five degrees.”

  “Less RF interference. Factored it into the signal integrity check.”

  “Good.”

  The anti-static cloth yielded to her careful unwrapping, revealing the Pentagon board—modded, rewired, its surface etched with minute alterations.

  “First-stage prototype,” she said, centering it between them. “Memory banking's done. Clock circuit's stable.”

  Dima's hand hovered above the board. “May I?”

  Irina nodded. “Go ahead.”

  His fingertips mapped the solder joints through touch and sight. Approval flickered across his features, subtle yet clear.

  “Efficient routing,” he murmured. “Yours?”

  “Pored over every trace myself.”

  Their eyes connected briefly before Dima grunted acknowledgment and Irina returned to her notes. The board's craftsmanship spoke volumes without words.

  The garage's chill dissipated as Dima recalled that first meeting three weeks ago. The cybercafé buzzed with Thursday evening activity—keyboard strokes mingled with technical debates and whirring cooling fans.

  Irina poured vodka with one hand while gesturing at a circuit diagram with the other, her blue-streaked hair catching the green phosphor glow of the monitors.

  “The theoretical framework is sound,” she announced to the Hardware Design SIG, her consonants sharp with her Dublin-learned inflection. “We've pushed the Pentagon to its Z80 architecture limits, but what if we stop trying to upgrade and start thinking about integration instead?”

  Dima perched alone at the group's edge, nursing a drink. The factory foreman's latest schedule change left him exhausted, while curiousity kept him from leaving.

  “What exactly are you proposing?” A voice rose from the crowd.

  Irina slid a bundle of papers across the bar counter—stapled printouts covered in meticulous Cyrillic annotations.

  “I'm calling it Chimera. It's a hardware integration framework for bridging the Pentagon with a 3Dfx Voodoo accelerator.”

  Dismissive laughter erupted from the assembled hobbyists. But Dima leaned forward, calculating distances between connection points on her circuit diagrams.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “The core challenge lies in getting our Z80 to speak meaningfully with a PCI device designed for Pentiums,” Irina pressed on, ignoring the skepticism. “My prototype uses a two-stage approach—first, the Z80 writes commands to a shared memory buffer.”

  Two dozen enthusiasts studied the papers with varying reactions. A balding engineer marked equations in the margins. University students huddled nearby, sketching circuits on napkins. A grey-haired man in a ДОСААФ shirt shook his head at the schematics while young hackers exchanged doubtful glances. A bespectacled woman traced signal paths, her expression brightening with comprehension.

  “The К561КТ3 analogue switches can't handle that signal integrity,” someone shouted.

  Dima studied her schematic before speaking. “They could if you buffered the input and isolated the power rails.” His words pierced the noise, drawing all eyes to him.

  Irina's gaze locked onto him—calculating, evaluating.

  “Go on,” she said, moving her vodka bottle aside to make room for her notes.

  The night stretched on after the others departed. They refined her original design on napkins and thermal paper receipts, his manufacturing expertise complementing her technical vision. A partnership forged over circuit traces and analog signal manipulation.

  The garage door crashed open, rattling the shelves. A blast of arctic air surged in with Azamat's booming voice.

  “Comrades of the revolution! I bring you the future!”

  He stomped snow from his boots onto the concrete. A military surplus bag swayed at his shoulder, its canvas fabric worn through years of use. He strode toward the workbench, still gloved, unzipping his jacket.

  “You started without me.” The bag hit the floor with a metallic clunk. “Excellent initiative.”

  Dima rushed to secure the door. “Keep it down. These walls echo.”

  “Relax, my friend. The FSB chase bigger prey than computer enthusiasts.” Azamat turned to Irina with a wink. “How many stops did they add to your metro line this week?”

  Irina acknowledged him with a curt nod.

  Azamat knelt, working the metal buckles on his bag. “Dima, listen. SCSI integration—”

  “Not happening,” Dima cut in, returning to the workbench. “Pentagon's bus won't handle the timing.”

  Azamat rummaged through the bag. “With DMA transfers—”

  “Bandwidth's not there.”

  Azamat pushed to his feet, exhaling. “You’re thinking inside the box. Think beyond polygons—mass storage enables procedural generation. Imagine Quake levels forming as you explore.”

  Dima's palms struck the workbench. “You're throwing dreams at silicon that won't keep up.”

  “That's why we build smarter. Think like a creator, not a consumer.”

  Dima's jaw clenched, but Irina's voice sliced through their mounting tension.

  “Let's establish what we're building before debating expansion.”

  “The voice of reason!” Azamat's grin widened. “Yes, let's define our miracle's scope.”

  The door hinges whispered. A sliver of frost crept in as Katya slipped inside, clutching a worn notebook bound with elastic bands. Her tall frame melting into the shadows as she observed the heated exchange.

  Her eyes darted between the men and the circuit boards while her thumb caught the paper's edge.

  “The heat dissipation alone would—” Dima started.

  “With proper copper sinks, we could easily—”

  “Your architecture wastes clock cycles on unnecessary—”

  “Excuse me.” Katya's words cut like a laser. Both men spun toward the voice they hadn't detected.

  She approached the workbench with measured steps, opening her notebook to reveal dense assembly code and timing diagrams.

  “You're missing the core issue.” She placed the notebook between them. “The Z80 architecture doesn't need direct SCSI integration or parallel processing for your goals.”

  Her finger traced the handwritten assembly code, each line marked with finely measured timing values.

  “You're optimizing the wrong bottleneck. The Z80 needs smarter scheduling, not brute force.”

  The next page revealed elegant timing diagrams, technical choreography in coloured pencil.

  Dima leaned in, his breath catching. The circuit design transcended his functional approach with its efficiency. Azamat's retort died in his throat.

  “This... this could work,” Dima murmured, his finger hovering above the pristine annotations.

  “It works through lateral thinking,” Katya explained, her confidence flowing through the diagrams rather than her stance. “The Pentagon needs better traffic management, not a faster engine.”

  She revealed another page where memory flows resembled Moscow Metro maps more than computer schematics.

  “But the bandwidth constraints—” Azamat began.

  “Become irrelevant with proper pipelining.” Her swift interruption surprised everyone, including herself. She tucked back a stray hair, the gesture betraying a flicker of doubt amid her technical certainty. “The Z80's limitations stem from poor data flow, not clock speed.”

  Dima's chair scraped concrete as he pushed back. His face twisted with the particular agony of a craftsman recognizing a master's work. Professional scepticism crumbled before undeniable brilliance.

  “Where did you learn this optimization style?”

  Katya's gaze fixed on her notebook. “Nowhere. I... observe patterns.” The next page revealed memory maps in delicate, coloured strokes. “Like a rapid transit system's peak passenger flow—smarter scheduling outperforms faster trains.”

  Irina's smile spread slowly. “Damn. The missing piece in my white paper.” She glanced between the men. “Gentlemen, we've found our architecture lead.”

  Katya's grip tightened on her notebook, caught between yearning for and fearing the light of recognition.

  Irina pulled a large roll of paper from her backpack.

  “Time to tackle the real challenge. Success depends on understanding signal interaction.”

  She swept Dima's workbench clear and spread the paper, anchoring its corners with dead vacuum tubes. The diagram dominated the surface—a labyrinth of circuit paths marked with handwritten notes and timing measurements. Coffee stained one corner, circled by frantic calculations.

  “The VideoMixer.” Her finger stabbed the centre. “The heart of Project Chimera.”

  Dima studied the paper, his work-roughened fingers floating above the design, eyes focused on the copper pathways.

  “Here's where modern Pentium architects get it wrong,” Irina said, her Dublin accent sharpening. “They squander computational resources on digital compositing when the real magic happens in the analogue domain.”

  “But digital processing gives us tighter control, surely?” Azamat stretched to see.

  “Not necessarily.” Irina pointed where the diagram forked in two before merging once more. “The VideoMixer combines two RGB signals—Pentagon ULA and Voodoo output—into a single coherent image using fast analogue switches controlled by a transparency mask.”

  Katya stepped forward, her gaze locked on the design.

  “Two RGB sources,” Irina continued. “The transparency mask determines which source 'wins' for each pixel as the electron beam scans.”

  “К561КТ3 analogue switches?” Dima asked.

  “Or Western 74HC4066. This demands pixel-level timing, not simple signal mixing.”

  “The К561КТ3 works if we limit the clock to 10 MHz.”

  “And buffered outputs to maintain signal integrity.”

  She smoothed a folded page against the diagram—a block schematic with component connections marked by crisp arrows.

  Katya's eyes followed intently. “Dynamic masking?”

  “Exactly. Static for UI elements, dynamic for gameplay, or intelligent using colour keys for chroma effects.”

  Dima's brow creased. “К561КТ3s grow scarce. Priced like gold at Mitino.”

  “Already solved. I've stockpiled two hundred chips from decommissioned military equipment. Enough for fifty prototypes.”

  “Synchronization poses a real problem,” Katya murmured. “The Voodoos pixel clock is free-running, but the ULA locks to PAL timing.”

  “Spot on.” Irina nodded with enthusiasm. “A PLL will sync Voodoo output to ULA timing.”

  “The current draw here…” Dima scrutinized the supply section. “Standard Pentagon PSU can't handle this.”

  “Dual power design. I've tested this with a modified ATX supply for the Voodoo, standard supply for base system.”

  “Separate digital and analogue grounds prevent noise coupling?”

  “Through star-point grounding to minimize interference.”

  Irina flipped the page to reveal columns of performance data.

  “My tunnel demo proves the concept. 3Dfx delivers 15 FPS with ULA status overlay. Code fits in 4.7 KB. Textures transfer at 170 KB per second.”

  Katya's expression brightened. “Outstanding.”

  “Z80 load stays near thirty percent, with zero visible switching artefacts.”

  “Think of it!” Azamat paced. “First-person adventures through the Kremlin with actual texture mapping. Elite with solid polygons…”

  “Level editors,” Dima added, surprising himself. “Creating 3D worlds through familiar Pentagon interfaces.”

  “музыкальные визуализации,” Katya offered quietly. “Sound-reactive 3D environments.”

  Irina grinned. “This isn't just about polygons or pixels. It's about proving our scene continues to innovate despite economic constraints.”

  Dima's expression softened. “This circuit design… it's elegant.”

  “Your expertise matters here.” Irina inclined her head at the rare compliment. “We need someone who understands both theory and the realities of production.”

  Katya opened her notebook to reveal intricate timing diagrams. “I've been thinking about the interrupt handling required for this. If we modify the Z80 interrupt service routines…”

  As Katya detailed her approach, Irina watched their group coalesce. Paths converging through shared purpose.

  Dima circled the workbench, previous hesitation forgotten. “Moving this regulator and realigning capacitors in a star pattern cuts noise by six decibels.”

  “That's brilliant. The Pentagon's power rail always ran hot at its limits.”

  “Factory experience teaches you where heat collects.” Dima's pencil glided across the page, his movements fluid, eyes bright with purpose.

  “Variable trace widths. Signal paths can go down to eight mil. Reduces crosstalk, saves copper.”

  Rapid fire technical exchanges replaced their earlier awkwardness and uncertainty.

  “The Voodoo's clock generator creates harmonics at 133 megahertz.”

  “Series resonators trap them. Salvaged flight computer inductor torroids.”

  Their rhythm quickened, ideas flowing.

  “If we shield the clock lines—” Dima began.

  “—with braided copper mesh,” Irina finished.

  A rare smile crossed Dima's face. “This transcends fantasy. This design shows genuine merit.”

  Irina noted his expression, understanding the weight of his approval. “That means a lot coming from you.”

  In the garage's chill, under the glow of aging screens and partial builds, they grasped a mutual understanding born from schematics and solder. That shared language of voltages and impedance bridged divides—a moment of connection amid surveillance, distrust, and their world's relentless transformation.

  The door creaked open a final time, admitting a blast of frigid air and a tall, thin figure who closed it quickly behind him. Vitya stood just inside the threshold, shoulders hunched and eyes darting across the gathered faces. His knuckles whitened as he clutched the strap of his backpack.

  “Is this—” He cleared his throat. “Irina's project meeting?”